Devil's Workshop

by Jáchym Topol

  But my dad didn’t want me to herd goats. He wanted me to learn how to be in charge and give orders, to turn men into machines. And one day, up on the ramparts, which have been blasted by cold winds for hundreds of years, so the bricks give off these tiny little clouds of red dust, the two of us got into a nasty argument. And near the end my dad must’ve realized that I was too grown up for him to beat me any more, and he clutched at his heart and he clutched at my hand, and I thought he was going to throw me off, but I stood tight and he slipped and fell, and landed thump on his back in the grass. My goats went running in every direction, so I climbed down and called out to calm them, and I tried to revive my dad the way they’d taught us in school, but it was no use.

  He had a huge military funeral. The units lined up on the main square and paraded through town till evening to the boom of artillery. They played all the most famous tunes from the nearby garrisons, and my aunts and Mr Hamáček, who ran the greengrocer’s, said it was the most beautiful funeral in all of Terezín’s history. Everybody liked it. And of course a lot of the soldiers who still lived in town congratulated me too. But then they locked me up.

  2

  They gave me a sentence of many years for my father’s death, but there’s no use talking about it. When they let me out, I headed straight for the nearest pub.

  All the other prisoners said that was what you did.

  That included the ones I had escorted to the trapdoor, they all said they’d rather be going to the nearest neighbourhood dive.

  Mr Mára, the technician, had a big huge prehistoric computer on his desk in the execution room, with a flickering green screen. He’d been arrested and convicted in a trial of cyberneticists, ‘traitors of the people’. But the prison administration had recognized his skills and he ended up as the executioner. Socialist cybernetics remained his passion.

  I was told the old hangmen needed vodka by the bucket-load to calm themselves down, but Mr Mára was a man of the modern era. He had invented a game. And that made everyone happy, from the high-ranking officers to the simple men who worked as guards.

  I was his helping hand.

  The way that happened was one day they were executing a gangster from Slovakia, a hulk of a man, shaking and kicking as they walked him down the corridor in chains. Four jailers had their hands full with him. He knocked over my pail while I was wiping the floor. But when he came to the threshold of Mr Mára’s room, he pulled up short, his legs frozen with horror, and I helped him.

  So they called me back the next time. And the time after that.

  The prison directors were amazed that when I walked with the prisoners, they didn’t whimper, didn’t scream wordlessly like animals, didn’t struggle. They were calm and quiet, I suppose because I was calm. My head, my mind, my legs were used to the twists and turns of Terezín’s tunnels, the gloom and concrete of the cells and bunkers, the iron of the bars, so nothing in my body or mind rebelled against the rooms of death, and I didn’t vomit, or pray under my breath, or have nightmares, or break down in tears afterwards, which, I was told, often happened to the jailers who were paid to escort the condemned to their end. I wasn’t paid, they just shortened my sentence. None of the jailers or other prisoners wanted to do it, but it didn’t bother me, walking past the death cells, trudging down the corridors that led to the trapdoor – I’d grown up playing in places like these. The people they executed in Pankrác in those days were serial killers, fraudsters, rapists, vicious gangsters. They weren’t war heroes like my parents any more, by that time most of the heroes like them were six feet under. So what? I thought as I led the prisoners on their last journey. Saboteurs of the socialist economy, rapists and heartless killers – they knew where they were going and why. Mr Mára and I were never rough with them, just firm.

  In quiet moments I’d sit next to Mr Mára, watching him operate the equipment, his long fingers dancing across the prehistoric keyboard, waiting for the coded radio command from the central office: Block B, prepare for winterizing!

  At this or some other agreed command I would get up and go to the cell and take the prisoner away under the jailers’ supervision and then calmly, by myself, lead him down the corridors to Mr Mára, who meanwhile made everything ready.

  When we came to the last room, some of the prisoners had beads of sweat on their forehead, their legs would freeze up like the Slovakian giant’s. I would help them. Mr Mára and I called it ‘seizing up’, like an engine. Even the calmest ones, who were quiet as we walked, or who teased and joked with me, about how I must be looking forward to the swill tomorrow, say – even they would sometimes suddenly seize up in horror, feeling queasy, about to vomit. My strength and my calm sometimes ceased to work on the threshold of the ropery. But Mr Mára always knew what to do.

  I wasn’t involved in carrying out the sentence.

  I just assisted with the preparations, and sometimes when it was done I would go and clean up with the bucket and rags and detergent.

  I don’t want to do that ever again.

  There were often long spells between carrying out the sentences. Then Mr Mára would let me sit at the computer, and my fingers, pale and peeling from the harsh detergent and countless buckets of water, would whizz across the keyboard, playing a game with dots that floated around the screen, crawling through fences and shooting each other. I would play the game and forget where and who I was, forget the screams and death rattles, forget the shit running down trouser legs, forget the faces of men turned into puppets by death, forget that I too was turning into a mindless puppet, reacting to the orders from the prison radio and the orders of Mr Mára, forget that everyone else in the prison hated me. It was probably one of the world’s first computer games.

  Thanks to Mr Mára’s teaching, I didn’t type with two fingers any more, like I used to on the old-fashioned typewriter at school. Soon I was almost as good as he was. He even had to adjust the game’s settings based on my scores.

  He wanted it to be used as a war game, for training.

  We were constantly improving it.

  I would’ve done anything that Mr Mára asked me to.

  By that point I had a cell to myself, since the prison officials were worried the other prisoners might try to kill me.

  My great dream, Mr Mára said, is to use my game to prepare people everywhere, but especially children, who love new things, for the world’s triumph over fascism.

  He may have been in prison, but Mr Mára was still a soldier and a communist. He couldn’t have been in his position otherwise, of course.

  One day these little games, Mr Mára said, pointing to the flickering screen with wires and cables poking out every which way, will connect people all over the world, and I’ll be part of it. What do you plan to do when your sentence is done?

  I think I shrugged.

  This was shortly before they abolished the death penalty in Czechoslovakia.

  Lucky for me that they did. Otherwise they probably wouldn’t have let me go.

  One day my reduced sentence came to an end.

  And I walked out.

  The first thing I did was to go and look for a dive. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. No family, no girlfriend.

  All that was about to change.

  So many of my fellow prisoners dreamed about the Pankrác dives, where their fathers, mothers, friends, girlfriends, cousins, children and wives would be waiting for them. Often what they found instead was nothing but the warm embrace of their tattooed fellow-travellers.

  I found Lebo waiting for me. He didn’t have any tattoos, though, since he was just a baby when he was in the camp. The authorities didn’t even know he existed.

  Lebo stood in front of the pub. He said he knew they were letting me out, but he didn’t like the idea of waiting in front of the prison.

  He looked exactly the same as I remembered him. An old man in a black suit. Lebo the giant, with his bare skull perched atop his veiny neck.

  We didn’t even go in the pub. There wa
sn’t a moment to spare. We were going home.

  Mr Hamáček, the greengrocer, drove us in his sputtering Škoda. He, like me, had grown old. He had some milk for me from the aunts, plus some bread with bacon fat, and hardboiled eggs from the Terezín hens.

  We all called Lebo uncle, all of us little kids and older children born in the garrison town of Terezín.

  Our fathers and mothers were soldiers, they didn’t have time for us, they kept the fortress town running and that was good enough.

  My mother wasn’t a soldier, but even so it had been better for me to be with Lebo.

  And now I was back with him again.

  3

  Lebo encouraged us as we crept through the maze of forbidden tunnels underneath Terezín, and he never gave us away when we trampled on some ancient sign saying or ZÁKAZ VSTUPU! or ACHTUNG, MINEN! We kept finding more and more hiding places in the sewers sprinkled with sand, forgotten stores of planks and gas masks, passageways and crawl spaces, and it didn’t put us off one bit when we found an execution chamber filled with spent bullet shells buried in the sand. We brought them to Lebo and he stuck them in his satchel.

  Lebo could make a bullet shell whistle louder than any of us. We would hold races in the catacombs, where he would clock our time with a stopwatch while we ran back and forth through the water that gushed from underground, and he always had some story to tell to comfort the littlest kids, who still got lost and frightened in the dark and felt cold every now and then.

  Being friends with Lebo was the best.

  And the thing that made him happiest was when we brought back tracings of the words we found on the walls of the tunnels and bunkers, deep underground – initials, dates, and messages carved with spikes, keys, and fingernails. He stuck them all in his big black satchel, because he was a collector: his passion was to know and remember everything connected with the days when the fortress town was a prison and a torture chamber and an execution ground.

  He wanted to find it all and preserve it.

  We were just kids, so we didn’t take it that seriously.

  Creeping through the catacombs, wading through puddles with blind cave newts, we explored the bunkers and firing cabins under the outermost bastions. And as boys and girls, future male and female soldiers, enchanted by the perpetual gloom and dripping water, we were soon exchanging shy kisses and fleeting touches. Amid the flicker of candles and the smell of dripping wax, how could we not, given that we were practically always together, not to mention our sneaking suspicion that it wouldn’t be long before we’d be ordered off to school, or maybe to some faraway garrison. Our favourite place to play was in the crawl spaces between the ramparts and the other forgotten parts of town, as far away from other people as possible.

  Some days we grazed the flock with stakes, some days without them. A goat on a chain would graze a circle in the grass by nightfall, and the next day we’d just move the stake. On sunny days – and there were plenty of them! – we often let the goats run free. They’d always find their way to where the grass was thickest. If a goat ran away, we could track it by its droppings. They were black, which made them easy to spot in the red grass.

  But even back then Lebo knew it had been decided and that Terezín’s days as a living town were numbered. The army was leaving.

  Lebo also knew the only part of town that would be preserved was the Monument, where the eggheads, in return for their cushy income, worked, as Lebo put it, hand in glove with the government, so they couldn’t have cared less that the town would be torn down.

  That was why he was so obsessed with every spike, every inscription, every bullet shell, each and every human bone we brought him back from our wanderings.

  He wanted to save it all.

  Being a kid, I never thought to ask him why. None of us did. He wouldn’t talk to anybody who asked him why the town should be preserved. Rolf the journalist was the one who eventually came up with an answer for the world. And now, if I want to ask why we shouldn’t let this town of evil collapse and let the grass grow over all the long-ago death, all the long-ago pain and horror, why not just let it disappear, Lebo can’t answer. All I hear now is the rustle of the grass, all I hear is the echo of footsteps in the ruins, the drip of water in the catacombs. It’s over, and nobody can answer me any more, because it happened: the town of Terezín fell.

  Mr Hamáček drove slowly while I just stared in amazement. In the days before I was in prison, every once in a while a swarm of Tatra 613s would come speeding down the road, which meant the government was coming to town for some war anniversary. The rest of the time it was just horse-drawn wagons, tractors from the collective farm, and every now and then a clunker or two like Mr Hamáček’s. Now the cars zoomed by, one after the other. Mr Hamáček explained that while I had been locked up, we had become part of Europe and there had been a tremendous influx of all sorts of new cars. I was amazed at the petrol stations, as lofty and clean as any spaceship I’d ever imagined, and as Mr Hamáček’s Škoda lurched to a stop at one of the pumps, I didn’t get out for fear of being crushed by all that open space, I didn’t even peek out of the window. And that was before I had any idea how Terezín had changed.

  I kept an eager lookout for the sign that said WITH THE SOVIET UNION FOR ALL TIME AND NEVER OTHERWISE. For my whole life it had marked the goat herd’s outermost post. But now it was gone, disappeared, nothing but a long, soggy field at the edge of the ramparts.

  As we drove into town we were greeted by silence, the silence of a destitute if not yet dead town, a town that had sunk into appalling poverty after the army left.

  Almost no one came here any more.

  What few tourists there were wandered around the Monument, up and down the educational trails they had put in to commemorate the genocide.

  We drove through Manege Gate, the Škoda shuddered to a stop on Central Square, and I froze.

  My aunts, among the few original inhabitants who had stayed, since they had nowhere to go, were now little old ladies, and the handful of other people stumbling towards us over the bricks and rocks and beams littering the ground, hair sticking out every which way, looked like castaways. They welcomed me back as a local son – old gents, old maids, and a couple of ghostly older men, mental cases and cripples who used to be soldiers. Now they were disabled and lived, literally, in holes in the ground.

  The brick walls of Terezín’s underground tunnels were caving in, black groundwater lapped everywhere. The massive gates, designed to withstand Prussian cannons, were crumbling bit by bit. Nobody weeded the grass on the ramparts any more.

  The goats? Mine had either all died or were so old I didn’t recognize them, except for a couple of young females and a single little billy goat, Bojek, headstrong, punch-drunk, and now nearly blind. I think he used to snuggle up to my scabby knees when I was a boy. I hadn’t forgotten that long-ago affection.

  I made note of people’s warnings that the mental cases were stealing, eating, or selling the goats. I took up my duties with the flock as soon as I was settled in.

  Lebo and Mr Hamáček brought me to one of the buildings on Central Square that they’d taken over and turned into the centre of the crumbling town.

  They lived in a room filled with old bunk beds made out of planks, I was told Lebo’s illegal birth had taken place on one of them.

  The Monument had been planning to build an office here, but the stubborn residents had blocked it.

  On one of the bunks I tossed a plastic bag with a toothbrush and a half-empty tube of toothpaste, that was all I had.

  My aunts gave me a facecloth, a sweater, some socks and a few other belongings from the people who had left, and I had a home.

  The building, which soon came to be known as the Comenium, was a squat. Lebo had occupied it along with a few other people whose homes had been demolished, just like my family’s had. It served as a clubhouse for the stubborn residents who had decided to stay in town. Or had no choice but to stay, since nobody wanted them anywhe
re else.

  Aunt Fridrich still operated her laundry, and on the ground floor she and the other aunts had brought in cookers, pans, pots and so on, and set up a cookshop.

  Nothing fancy – after all those canteens of clamouring men and clubs for officers like my dad, it was a pitiful place. But you could almost always get a bowl of soup or cup of tea.

  The scholars and eggheads and board members didn’t come here. They stayed in the Monument, tending to their state-funded trails that highlighted the wartime horrors, running their fingers over maps of the disappearing town hand in hand with the government engineers, carving out the lines of destruction.

  Lebo had broken with the board members and scholars. At first they ridiculed him for his demand that not a single brick should disappear from the town, not even in the modern era, as he put it. Of course they did it behind his back, when no one was around. Lebo had been born in Terezín during the war, and that fact alone froze the blood in a lot of people’s veins, so it wouldn’t have been fitting for the researchers and board members to mock him to his bony face.

  At first the researchers called in some of the people who’d passed through Terezín as prisoners, and a lot of them said: It’s about time, this whole town of death and humiliation can go to hell! Take this train station, where hundreds of thousands went east and never came back, and wipe it right off the map! It should only exist in textbooks!

  But others were of a different opinion, and as one debate led to another the bricks continued to crumble.

  Until the government, advised by the researchers and board members, came to a decision.

  The Monument would be preserved, but not the town. There wasn’t money for it.

  Lebo stayed out of the arguments and withdrew from the Monument. He had been hardened in Terezín as a baby, and as far as time was concerned he had a clear advantage over the older prisoners. He didn’t want to squander it debating.